Queer Flowers: Queer Erotics, Mourning, and Utopias in the Art of Flowers from the 1920s to the 1980s

Li, Wenzhe

Abstract

“The analogies between women and flowers have a long history in sex ideology” (Pollock: 2007: 106). Yet queer readings of flowers are sometimes different from heterosexual and patriarchal perspective. Some gender-queer artists have refused to see flowers merely as the symbols of femininity or female sexual desire that is oppressed into unconsciousness. Biologically, flowers can be queered because most of them are hermaphroditic. Some flowers, such as violets, pansies, and lavender, are considered as the symbols of LGBTQ+ culture. Queer qualities of the natural world seem to provide ethical legitimacy and identification for queer beings. However, in the story of queer flowers, are there any alternative connotations beyond this established connection of symbolism and identification?
This thesis discusses the queer art of flowers between the 1920s and the late 1980s. By examining the floral artworks of the American artists Georgia O’Keeffe, Charles Demuth, Marsden Hartley, Cy Twombly, Robert Mapplethorpe, and the British artist Derek Jarman, this thesis argues that the queer art of flowers not only symbolises nonbinary sexualities, but also contains a wide variety of sensibilities, aesthetic philosophies, ideologies, and politics. This study examines the erotic and temporary sensibilities that the artists perceived when they painted or meditated on flowers, exploring how queer desires circulate through botanical and natural agencies. Furthermore, it investigates the anecdotes, gossip, and queer memories of desires behind these floral works. This thesis considers queer floral art as an archive of queer desires, in which we could sense ideality and utopias that “can be distilled from the past and used to imagine a future” (Muñoz, 2009: 1). This archival function of queer floral imagery therefore offers us an imaginative way of mourning and memorialisation, stressing that it is important to remember a queer ideality that contains both trauma and pleasure. This study argues that queer artists created floral art not because they were eager to liberate oppressed desires, and not entirely because those androgynous flowers morphologically resembled their queer sexualities. These artists created floral art mostly because they attempted to find strategies to negotiate, resist, and survive by interacting with flowers and natural environments. It is this interaction that opens up another space for exploring the significance of queer flowers beyond symbolism and the politics of identity. This transcorporeal connection between human beings, flowers, and natural environments illustrates how a wild nonhuman force supports
and simultaneously disturbs the human body and system. This dynamic registers the vulnerability and porousness of human bodies, and thus deconstructs identity, subjectivity, individualism, and bodily autonomy. The flower-body connection potentially deconstructs the boundary between the human and the nonhuman and thus envisages a utopian “planetary” solidarity.

Citation

Li, W. Queer Flowers: Queer Erotics, Mourning, and Utopias in the Art of Flowers from the 1920s to the 1980s. (Thesis). University of Hull. https://hull-repository.worktribe.com/output/4867124

• Thesis Type: Thesis
• Deposit Date: Oct 16, 2024
• Publicly Available Date: Oct 29, 2024
• Keywords: American studies
• Public URL: https://hull-repository.worktribe.com/output/4867124
• Additional Information: American Studies; School of Humanities; University of Hull
• Award Date: Jul 23, 2024